The White Lotus star Jason Isaacs: "I was out of my head for the first 10 or 20 years of my career"

“It’s about identity, spirituality and existentialism,” he decides of the hit HBO drama that culminates this week. “And sex, fun, rock ’n’ roll. And tofu, because it’s Thailand.”

Wherever the series is set – first Hawaii, then Sicily and now Thailand – the genius of Mike White’s satire about five-star resorts and the awful people who frequent them is to make us complicit. Viewers may feel morally superior to the amoral cast, but we still vicariously enjoy their lifestyle.

In filming the series, its stars themselves became pampered westerners in Thailand. “We took over this extraordinary, beautiful place and were each given a gigantic, insanely luxurious villa,” reveals Issacs. “It came with a butler – and I don’t want a butler. I don’t want anybody even making a cup of tea for me. I don’t like it.”

Isaacs, who was born into a Jewish family in Liverpool in 1963, isn’t, it quickly becomes clear, entirely comfortable with privilege. “Actors for a long time were vagabonds; the women were prostitutes and the men were thieves,” he says. “I think that more befits who we are.”

The 61-year-old actor, who has been married to documentary-maker Emma Hewitt since 2001 and has two daughters, Lily (22) and Ruby (19), was clearly uneasy with some of the things he encountered in Thailand. “If you open your eyes, you see inequitable couples all the time, much older European men with much younger women. It’s a transactional relationship where they both get something from it, but as a father, and also just as a human, it felt completely repulsive to me to see.”

When we meet his character, Ratliff, who has taken his family to Thailand at huge expense simply so his daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) can do a college report on Buddhism, he has no such qualms. His wife Victoria (Parker Posey) is ghastly, as are their sons, sexist Saxon and wet-as-water Lachlan played by Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola; respectively the offspring of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Emily Mortimer. “I expected Patrick particularly to be a bit of a princess, given where he came from,” says Isaacs, addressing any nepo-baby concerns before I can voice them. “But I was very disappointed, because he was gorgeous.”

As Ratliff tries to stop his business affairs unravelling back in the US, he is beset by minor irritations that cause him major problems. Mobiles are banned at the hotel, lest they interfere with the spiritual ambiance required to help “these dilettantes”, as Isaacs puts it, “somehow become Buddhist monks and change their lives”. Could Isaacs survive a digital detox? “I don’t know, I have a very addictive personality. I don’t take drugs or drink any more, because I liked them both much too much in the olden days.

“I had to stop video games because they took over my life. I was playing Tetris and was seeing shapes over people’s heads and in my dreams. The only times that I’m ever not in 100 places in my head is when I’m in someone else’s personality when I’m acting, or when I’m doing sport.” So, his career filled the space that drink and drugs once occupied? “Oh no, I was out of my head for the first 10 or 20 years of my career.”

He’s spoken before about his addictions but is happy to revisit the subject. “I tried to stop every Monday. I tried to stop every birthday, every New Year’s Eve.” So what finally made him do so? “I felt kind of insane a lot of the time. But I was terrified I’d become incredibly bland and boring if I stopped, and I don’t know, maybe I have. But maybe there’s still some of the madness left.”

I reassure him that the madness was there to see in Armando Iannucci’s 2017 film The Death of Stalin, where he gave a blisteringly macho performance as Soviet Marshal Zhukov, his broad chest festooned with medals. “That wasn’t my chest,” he reveals. “They stuffed the jacket; inside I’m like Charles Hawtrey.”

I feel a little naive, fooled by the tricks of the television trade. “Everything you see is pretend,” he advises. “None of it is me.” This may well include Ratliff’s penis, which was briefly glimpsed – much to his children’s horror – when his dressing gown flopped open in the fourth episode of The White Lotus and has been reported to be what the industry refers to euphemistically as a prosthetic. We spoke before the public furore the scene caused, nonetheless Isaacs resisted any attempt to explain everything we see in his performances. “I don’t know that the audience needs to know how the sausage is made,” he says. Which just about covers it.

Has the family been impressed by the attention Dad’s getting for The White Lotus? “My wife and kids don’t give a flying f*** about me being famous,” he says. “It’s just, will I take the bins out and will I drop them off and pick them up? Members of the public ascribe far too much status to people like me who just put on silly voices for a living.”

For some, Isaacs will forever be Lucius Malfoy, the obsessively anti-Muggle wizard (and father of Draco) in the Harry Potter movies – which must, I suggest, have been great for his daughters when they were young. “They hated it,” he scoffs. “Always found it embarrassing. You want to be introduced as yourself, and not, ‘This is my friend. Oh, by the way, her dad’s Lucius Malfoy.’”

His other silly voices have included Dick Dastardly in a Scooby-Doo film and more conventional rotters like British officer Colonel Tavington, opposite Mel Gibson in the American Revolution drama The Patriot. “I’m used to playing quite a lot of people who are very difficult, supposedly, and even unpleasant,” he says. “My wife will ask, ‘Why?’ And I go, ‘Well, he’s really insecure…’ and she’ll say, ‘But he’s a dick.’

“Even in Harry Potter, ironically. I’m playing a wizard, but who is he? He is a cowardly, racist bully who’s trying to make the old world great again. He’s someone who thinks the world was better when people like him ruled and newcomers didn’t come and challenge things. You can call them Muggles or you can call them Mexicans, but I recognised him as a human being.”

Who wouldn’t Isaacs play? “Well, at some point you have to draw the line,” he says. “A story that advocated anti-Semitism or racism or misogyny, at the end of which people went, ‘You know what? It’s not as bad as people paint it.’”

Racism in The White Lotus manifests as westerners’ reduction of Thai people and culture to cliché. Guests at White Lotus resorts go to countries without really being in them, experiencing the same corporate luxury flavoured with an ersatz version of the local culture, wherever they are. The drama happens when reality breaks through – something that Isaacs, whose wife accompanied him in Thailand, saw for himself.

“We had the five-star luxury experience. But when you go to the more touristy places, you’ll see things that turn your stomach, that are morally very challenging. You see tremendous wealth and then tremendous poverty – there are places where it’s so impoverished and where there is brutality. But there is kindness and humility and gentleness in the Thai people.”

And is that humility and kindness, the spirituality of Thai culture, something that will stay with Isaacs – did he find enlightenment at the White Lotus? “I intend to do more yoga and meditation,” he says. “At some magical time in the future, when I stop scrolling on the phone and watching telly.”

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The White Lotus season 3 concludes on Monday 7th April 2025.

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